We feel robbed. Nicola was handling her epilepsy, taking her medication which was reviewed periodically but she nor us knew anything about sudden unexpected death. Because of this they had become 'too complacent' about the illness and the family would have been more wary if they had been made aware of the risk of SUDEP.
"I need to honour them in the best way and in every way that I can. Everybody is here supporting Rioghnach-Ann too and she knows her brothers are living on in a really good way in their memory."
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk writes in 'The Body Keeps the Score' that trauma doesn't just live in our minds - it reshapes how our bodies respond to emotion. Sometimes, when we experience significant loss, our nervous system essentially decides that feeling is too dangerous and shuts down the whole operation.
Living with family as an adult is often framed as a "failure to launch," but navigating grief at home with my mom and younger sister helped me rethink growth. Living at home in my 20s wasn't easy at first, but after my dad died, living together became a lifeline that transformed my understanding of what adulthood truly means.
Today I saw images of students leaving their school with their hands raised in the air, hours after cowering in fear and terror in barricaded classrooms. Nine dead and twenty-seven wounded in the tiny Rocky Mountain town of Tumbler Ridge. The mayor, Darryl Krakowka, said, "I have lived here for 18 years. I probably know every one of the victims." And this in Canada, which often seems to us Americans like a bastion of sanity and normalcy in comparison with our madness.
Peter Dervin had spent all day by his son's side in Broomfield Hospital before he decided to get dinner. He pleaded with staff at the Essex facility not to leave his eldest child, Greg, alone in his absence. "They almost laughed at me and said, 'This is what we do. We're nurses and we look after patients'," Dervin recalls. Greg had been given lorazepam, an anxiety drug flagged by clinicians as leaving him prone to becoming unsteady and agitated.
February 20 is National Caregivers Day, celebrating caregivers everywhere, whether they are friends, professional caregivers, or family members, for the hard physical and emotional work they do that often goes unseen. Caregivers also include surviving parents trying to navigate their grief after the death of their spouse, while also supporting children who are trying to navigate their grief from the death of their parent.
When we think of rituals, we tend to think of face masks and wellness trends. But there are actually ways to use rituals to help heal grief and deal with stressful times. On this episode, Lucy Lopez, Elizabeth Newcamp, and Zak Rosen are joined by ritual expert Betty Ray to talk about creative ways to help children process grief and big emotions, how to use ritual to create safety and expression, and much more.
'They're dead.' In disbelief, my response was unfiltered. 'What?' Followed by the F word. A wave of emotion rushed through me. My chest tightened. My body went cold. I could not immediately find the words to offer condolences, not because I did not feel them deeply, but because inside, my many parts were experiencing a collective shock. When you live with dissociative identity disorder (DID), news like this does not land in one place. It ricochets across all parts within.